\n<\/p>\n
More recently, Mark Ruffalo<\/strong> played twins in I Know This Much Is True<\/em>, which Pascarelli also worked on as a VFX supervisor before Dead Ringers.<\/em> While Weisz would shoot her sides as Beverly and Elliot within the same day, Ruffalo\u2019s performance was more protracted because his twins were not supposed to physically match each other. \u201cThey were both Mark Ruffalo, but he had to gain 30 pounds or so,\u201d Pascarelli says. \u201cSo we had to separate the shooting of the two twins by six weeks.\u201d The upside was that one performance was entirely finished and could be matched more easily.<\/p>\n Dead Ringers<\/em> benefited from more than a century of twins on film, and many of the old techniques still work, albeit merged with new ways to hide the transitions.<\/p>\n Birch refers to this innovative fusion of old and new techniques as \u201chacks,\u201d and without them, Weisz\u2019s performance as the Mantle twins would be nowhere near as creepy. Her twin doctors are almost pathologically inappropriate\u2014heedless in their professional work, and disturbing in their private lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI think the intimacy, for sure, is a little troubling. It\u2019s creepy,\u201d Birch says. \u201cIt gives [the show] much of its very strange kind of slippery tone. But particularly at the beginning, it\u2019s setting up the stakes.\u201d The twins are engaged in various acts of seduction\u2014sometimes with wealthy benefactors whose money they need for their clinic, and sometimes with patients they prey on as romantic partners. All of these bad decisions begin to weigh on the troubled sisters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Birch felt she had to establish their unsettling closeness\u2014which wouldn\u2019t have been the same if the viewers weren\u2019t convinced of the doubling trick. \u201cCodependence feels like much too small a word to show what\u2019s going on there,\u201d Birch says. \u201cThey\u2019d been completely close, and completely intertwined, and [meant] everything to one another. Then, hopefully, we\u2019ll really feel that rupture and divide.\u201d<\/p>\n Birch and her writing team first imagined the story with zero constraints, writing interactions between Beverly and Elliot as if they could easily be performed by two separate actors. \u201cI didn\u2019t think about the technical side at all, which, looking back, feels mad,\u201d Birch says. \u201cIn the writers room we talked about how we wanted them to be as close as possible, and that they would be in the same frame as much as possible, and there\u2019s physical contact.\u201d<\/p>\n Only later, in preproduction, did they confront the limitations, and the never-ending question of how to accomplish each interaction. \u201cNo matter how much knowledge you had about how to do twins, each scene created its own scenario where you would have to come up with something new or some new way of doing it,\u201d Durkin says.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n